Costica Bradatan - Philosophy Needs a New Definition
Philosophy has never only been about
rational argumentation. It would be the saddest thing if it were, and it would
not have lasted that long. What makes philosophy such an endurable affair, in
the West as well as in the East, is that it engages not only our cognition, but
also our imagination, emotions, artistic sensibility, religious impulses — in
short, our being complicated, messy, impure creatures. To be human is to be
always caught in existential entanglements, to have to deal with hybridity and
messiness of all sorts. We are an unlikely union of high and low, spirit and
flesh, reason and unreason. And philosophers, if they are not to lose their
integrity, need to account for such wholeness.
That’s why philosophy - not the bland
academic sort, but the lasting, transformative variety that we come across in
Lao Tzu, Pythagoras, Plato, Saint Augustine, Rumi, Meister Eckhart, Spinoza,
Marx, Nietzsche, Gandhi, Simone Weil - doesn’t come in a pure state. It always
gets mixed with myth, poetry, drama, mysticism, scientific thinking, political
militancy, or social activism. To complicate matters, often fiction writers
(think Dostoyevsky, Huxley, or Borges) turn out to be particularly insightful
philosophers, and so do filmmakers - such as Bergman, Kurosawa, and Tarkovsky - who philosophize just as insightfully on screen. All these entanglements and
contaminations mark philosophy profoundly — indeed, they make it what it is.
Take a Sufi poem by Rumi. How can we tell,
as we let ourselves be absorbed by it, where poetry ends and philosophy begins,
or when and how mysticism starts stealing in? When Lao Tzu speaks of water —
“the best (man) is like water. Water is good; it benefits all things and does
not compete with them. It dwells in (lowly) places that all disdain. That is
why it is so near to Tao” — does he really “make an argument”? Why should we
care? There is a cosmic vision encapsulated here, a sense of being in the world
and an understanding of the human condition that defy our petty notions of how
philosophy should conduct itself. To cut open such a work only to extract from
it its “argument” — discarding everything else, ignoring the design and vision
of its author — is to kill the beating heart of that work, and to start dealing
in corpses. Why should we do that?
Walter Benjamin used storytelling liberally
in his philosophical work. He created fictions, long and short, or borrowed
them from others, and this was no whim: Benjamin really thought philosophy and
literature were profoundly interlinked; he speaks of “the epic side of truth,”
and relates it to “the art of storytelling.” Humans are narrative-driven
creatures for whom form is as important as any content. We can make sense of
ourselves and the world in which we live insofar as we can weave narratives
about ourselves and the world. Sartre, who knew a thing or two about philosophy
and literature, wanted, in his work, to be both Spinoza and Stendhal.
If we experience everything as a story in
the making, then there is indeed an “epic side” to truth, and philosophy, by
definition, is bound to use literary craft. With every new story we make the
world anew. Storytelling pushes the boundaries of what it means to be human:
envisions and rehearses new forms of experience, gives firm shape to something
that hasn’t existed before, makes the unthought-of suddenly intelligible.
Storytelling and philosophy are twins. Plato’s “allegory of the cave” makes an
important philosophical point in such a poignant manner precisely because it’s
such a good story. Yet how are we to tell, in such a case, the storyteller from
the philosopher? “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” wondered the
poet. But why should we?
Since philosophy and literature are so
intimately intertwined, pathos is not something philosophers just pepper their
work with, but it’s already there, embedded in their work. No sooner do you
start philosophizing than you begin emplotting ideas, experimenting with form,
employing rhetorical tropes, toying with emotions, and making room for empathy
— that is, crafting a piece of literature...
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